To me the issue isn’t simply that you need to track the meta to be competitive, it’s that the game only
worked when decks were less powerful.
When games regularly took 10–20 turns, luck evened out pretty well even if you were a bit slow out the gate. But now when your opponent is putting out threats on every single turn that need to be countered, there’s nearly zero room for unlucky draws. Given two opponents, the odds that both of them will have sufficiently equal luck to produce an interestingly competitive game has dropped below a threshold where the game is actually fun to play.
If you don’t play the meta, you get curb stomped. If you do play the meta, most of the time the outcome of the game is essentially predetermined (and obviously so) by the luck of both of your draws or by hard counter matchups. Only a handful of games ever feel like both sides have fighting chances.
Frankly, the majority of games these days could be decided in seconds by both sides revealing their opening hard and mutually agreeing on the outcome.